VERITAS Continues Linux Push

Rolling Out the Product Line

At the January LinuxWorld Expo 2004, VERITAS made a number of announcements that
demonstrate this company's commitment to the Linux space, and the new products have kept coming steadily since then.

One of
the major changes is that, while before, VERITAS Linux solutions were
only available for Red Hat Linux, support for SUSE has also been added
for its core Linux product line--except for NetBackup, which has
supported SUSE and Red Hat since v4.5 in April 2002.

When asked whether
the initial decision to make this happen was made before or after
Novell's initial mentions of potentially purchasing SUSE, Ranajit
Nevatia (VERITAS director of Linux Strategy) pointed out that this move
actually began two years ago and took this long to implement´┐Żwith the
Novell and SUSE news coming merely at an opportune time, perhaps
reinforcing the wisdom of this strategy.

Along with expanded Linux distribution support, VERITAS has added
enterprise-strength functionality that was missing from their previous
Linux offerings. According to Nevatia, a full set of enterprise storage
features falls into three major categories: data protection (backup,
recovery, and high availability of data in particular), high
availability in the broader sense (clustering for failover and better
server utilization), and storage management (storage virtualization,
filesystems, and volume management). Without support for these three
classes, says Nevatia, most enterprise institutions will hesitate to
migrate their data fully toward a particular platform. Under the VERITAS
banner, at the very least, Linux is now covered.

New additions to the VERITAS line of Linux products include SUSE Linux versions of the
VERITAS Foundation Suite, the VERITAS Cluster Server, and VERITAS
OpForce. The Foundation Suite is a combination of the VERITAS Volume
Manager (VM) and the VERITAS File System. With the VM in place, you can
use a single server and interface to handle disparate storage locations
across a heterogeneous network, allowing you to spread data amongst
machines regardless of what they are running. Alongside it in the
Foundation Suite, the File System offers journaling to minimize downtime
after a system crash, along with the ability to resize components on the
fly and make backup snapshots.

In addition to adding SUSE support, VERITAS OpForce further extends
server and blade provisioning tools into the Linux space with its latest
update. VERITAS OpForce 3.2 can now be integrated with both SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server 8, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. In addition to
these new capabilities, OpForce has also added the ability to provision
Intel 64-bit Itanium servers; the ability to find machines capable of
PXE boot and netboot, and then use a set of customized rules to
provision and pool resources on the fly; rules for associating
particular blade server chassis with particular installation images; and
even more automated provisioning features. Those who spend a lot of time
in installation and setup or need to ready similar machines on the fly
will love this point and click shortcut approach.

The other major update is the VERITAS Cluster Server. This product's
main addition, aside from the expanded operating system support, is the
ability to cluster VMware instances. When asked why someone might want
to cluster VMware, Nevatia explained that VMware is used in the server
room as well as on desktops. On desktops, it is typically used for
running multiple operating system instances for technical support, or by
technical writers needing screenshots of otherwise difficult to access
areas, such as the BIOS. In the server room, on the other hand, VMware
might be used to run applications in a sandboxed environment so that
someone who hacks into them is trapped within that VM without being able
to attack the rest of the programs and logins on the main server. Also,
a popular use of VMware in the server room is when you might need to run
a suite of applications on different operating systems, but conveniently
on the same hardware at the same time.

Another interesting use of VMware technology is to take advantage of
traditionally slow times on powerful servers. You can launch a VM to run
an entirely different program and operating system if necessary, and
then close it before the peak time approaches.

Finally, VMware is often used for server consolidation, which can be
risky if administrators need to consolidate down to several or a single
server. Clustering VMware allows for adding failover capabilities to
your virtual machines, immediately swapping over to a different VM
instance when one dies. It's also useful for planned downtime for
management purposes, and moving VMs from one physical machine to
another.